The complete text of Carmen, with footnotes and Crichtonian epilogue on the author’s studies on Romany runs to 60 pages. To make it a reasonable investment, Hesperus Press pushed it to 93 pages with the inclusion of Prosper Mérimée’s horror story ‘The Venus of Ille’ (1837), also translated by Andrew Brown. A tale of terror that proves once again how the French do love their schlock horror tropes.

I can’t find any meaningful background to the story so I’m going to devote this space to the achievements of Prosper Mérimée (1803 – 1870) himself, a remarkably accomplished and even heroic individual in the field of architecture. He served as Inspector General of Historic Monuments from 1834 to 1860. The monarchy had returned to France and they set out to protect and restore the symbols of the France overthrown by the revolution: the monarchic and religious buildings and ornaments that had been seized, stripped, melted down and vandalized by the revolutionaries. Historic France was in need of wide-scale restoration and Mérimée was perfect for the job, having an eye for quality and the patient charm and cleverness of a diplomat. There were no protective laws for historic buildings at the time – Mérimée could only fulfill his task by convincing the local authorities to maintain their unacknowledged monuments. I highly recommend this article by Julian Barnes for more detail on the subject but to encapsulate: he rediscovered the tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, moldering in the castle of Boussac and he saved the medieval ramparts of Avignon from demolition. He fought countless battles across the country and tirelessly promoted monument preservation. In addition he was a government worker, courtier, Russian translator, historian, ghost writer to Napoleon III and novelist, whose Carmen would inspire the greatest French opera of all time. He was an atheist who saved churches, a minor writer but a major player in French civilization, a truly remarkable man who should be far better known.

This background leads back to ‘The Venus of Ille,’ written early in his architectural career. The narrator visits a town where a statue of Venus has recently been unearthed by his host M. Alphonse de Peyrehorade. He stays for the wedding of Peyrehorade’s son and witnesses the statue wreaking terrible vengeance upon the family. When you think of Mérimée’s work and the battles he lost this story actually starts to make a lot of sense. How do you get up each morning and fight for something so many people don’t even give a damn about?

‘I just need to wish the idol goodnight,’ said the bigger of the apprentice boys, suddenly stopping.He bent down, and doubtless picked up a stone. I saw him flex his arm, throw something, and immediately a loud clang echoed from the bronze. At the same moment the apprentice’s hand shot to his head, as he cried out in pain.‘She’s rejected me!’ he exclaimed.And those two scamps took to their heels in flight. It was obvious that the stone had rebounded off the metal, and had punished that young scoundrel for the outrage he had committed against the goddess.
I closed the window, laughing heartily.
‘Another vandal punished by Venus! May all the destroyers of our ancient monuments get a similar headache!’ And uttering this charitable desire, I went to sleep.

Knowing something of the author’s life gives this greater coherency and also explains his cutting portrait of provincial life and culture. I was deeply shocked to see a young man seemingly more enthusiastic about the dowry his future wife was bringing him than about her lovely eyes. Mérimée seems to feel unalloyed disgust at the lot of them. Venal, materialist, greedy, ribald, gluttonous and indifferent to any higher sentiments, the wedding party brings out nothing but a sense of distaste in the narrator and M. Alphonse de Peyrehorade masks his overweening pride (badly) with cloying humility. The only one spared from this portrait is the bride-to-be, whom the narrator pities. ‘What a shame,’ I mused as I left Puygarrig, ‘that such a likable person should be rich, and that her dowry should mean she is sought out by a man who doesn’t deserve her!’ Mérimée used this story to punish two types of people I assume he strongly disliked: the vandals of historic architecture and those who arrange marriages for profit. ‘What a hateful thing an arranged marriage is!’ I thought. ‘A mayor puts on a tricolour sash, a priest slips on a stole, and there you have it: the nicest girl in the world, married to a Minotaur! What can human beings who don’t love each other find to say at a moment like that, a moment which two real lovers would pay with their lives to obtain?’

Then there’s the horror aspect to all of this, which does start off quite well. Statues have an uncanny quality and this is effectively leveraged at the start, what with the Venus’ hand jutting out of the ground like a discoloured corpse, it breaking a man’s leg while being pulled out of the earth and its malignant stare – empty silver eyes in a blackened bronze face. The problem arrives with the end of the story, where ‘The Venus of Ille’ turns into something Hammer film studios or Roger Corman could have gladly filmed. I can actually see Corman slapping the name Berenice onto the bride and calling it another Poe adaptation.

Spoilers.

Young Peyrehorade is challenged to a tennis match and slips his fiancée’s ring onto the statue’s finger while he competes. The fatuous idiot discovers too late that he can’t remove the ring from Venus and that night heavy footsteps ascend the stairs as Venus comes to the bridal chamber and crushes the groom to death in her iron arms! The bride goes insane, no one believes her story and the statue is later melted down for a church bell…causing the church vines to wither away. OoooOOOooohh.

End spoilers.

Okay, if that had been made into a B movie it would probably have been a blast but that’s because I have always liked my horror movies nonthreatening. Books are another matter and I greatly prefer Stoker and Lovecraft (or even Radcliffe) over this ludicrous plotline.

It’s also strange from a propaganda point of view. Mérimée wanted to preserve ancient works so why write a story where an ancient monument brings horror and suffering to the town that dug it up? I mean, he’s not making a good case here and I certainly wouldn’t want that thing in my yard. Maybe he just figured none of the local officials would read his fictions, which he did seem to view as a recreational activity (nobody reads his monument writings anymore but at the time I suspect he was better known for his day job than his stories).

When it comes right down to it, the important thing about Prosper Mérimée was the work he did to save historic France. He didn’t save everything he set his sights on and he didn’t do it alone but he was a figurehead. As much as I love Bizet’s Carmen, this was his truly great achievement.

The ramparts of Avignon.

Mérimée died in 1870. Seventeen years later a man called Le Corbusier was born, a living instrument of the destruction of historic architecture, father of “urban planning” and all its attendant social decay, founding figure… of modernism.

There was a reason J.G. Ballard called his ‘Lord of the Flies’ novel High-Rise.

That’s only one of his design abominations. There’s more!

Tree, lawn, building, bench. Only three of these things are in harmony.

Had Mérimée been able to see the future I think he would have wished far more than a headache on the vandals and destroyers of Europe. The picture above? That’s a monastery. My first thought was to go check and yes, Le Corbusier was an atheist. Instead of saving churches, he took revenge on them. I really don’t know what else to call that.

So I went to YouTube and typed in “modern architecture is bad” and the first thing that came up was this bloke:

Over 700,000 watched this video. There are also all kinds of internet groups tracking architectural tragedies and triumphs across the globe, calling for protection, restoration and revival and there are always local societies as well. You can find them, you can join them, you can name your son Prosper (it hasn’t charted in France since 1962) and defy the tidal wave of glass and concrete in whatever small way you can, because it isn’t permanent. A demolished tower block brings back the skyline. Prosper Mérimée would have known that.

“Luke,” she called, leaning over the banisters. “Doctor.” Her voice was not loud, and she had tried to keep it level, but she heard the doctor’s book drop to the floor and then the pounding of feet as he and Luke ran for the stairs. She watched them, seeing their apprehensive faces, wondering at the uneasiness which lay so close below the surface in all of them, so that each of them seemed always waiting for a cry for help from one of the others; intelligence and understanding are really no protection at all, she thought.

Any haunted house story should feature the haunted house as the main character. You wait with bated breath for the next room revealed, the next move it makes. The people staying in such a place can be sympathetic or not but ideally they should be able to hold their own against the house, retaining concern (if sympathetic) or at least interest. The brightly sketched quartet of guests who make their way to the eponymous locale at the beginning of The Haunting of Hill House seem made to fit the bill, but the interest I felt in their fates was quashed as soon as they opened their mouths.

Dr. John Montague, a researcher of the paranormal cast sadly adrift in the 1950s (far past the heyday of Victorian ghost hunters and spirit mediums) resolves to stake his reputation on investigating the ill-reputed Hill House. Needing assistants for his research, he hires two young women with paranormal incidents in their backgrounds (a seemingly psychic card-reading in the case of bohemian Theodora and a poltergeist incident of falling rocks in the unhappy childhood of Eleanor Vance, our protagonist). Along with Luke Sanderson, the charming but useless young man who stands to inherit Hill House, the group moves in for the summer and choose (in a show of bravado and then as a coping mechanism) to act like carefree schoolchildren on holiday; behaving like overgrown Bobbsey Twins, planning picnics and engaging in wannabe-Wildean banter. Here’s Luke and Theodora playacting (they call Eleanor “Nell”):

“I would like to have been a goatherd, I think.”“If you were not a bullfighter.”“If I were not a bullfighter. Nell’s affairs are the talk of the cafes, you will recall.”“Pan. You should live in a hollow tree, Luke.”“Nell, you are not listening.”
“I think you frighten her, Luke.”

They talk like that a lot. Even Dr. Montague behaves in this asinine manner (pouting when it turns out Theodora doesn’t know how to play bridge, for example). After the first manifestations he complacently states that “not one of us, even after last night, can say the word ‘ghost’ without a little involuntary smile.” This was the moment where I realized that, horror classic or not, I was incapable of feeling any concern for these nitwits and started rooting for the house. It felt as if Shirley Jackson herself lost her interest in the cast, particularly the males, as soon as they entered Hill House. Luke is introduced feet first as a liar and a thief but nothing further is done with this information and he spends most of his time engaging in stale make-believe with the girls and manning the brandy decanter. Eleanor’s sole conversation with him leaves her bored – …the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting. Hey, I don’t blame her and I suspect Jackson felt the same. Montague has equally little use outside of the exposition and house tour he provides. As for Theodora, her characterization is patchy and changeable from scene to scene (critics like to read lesbian subtext in the two women’s interactions but I think Eleanor has way better chemistry with Hill House than any of the people staying there).

Eleanor is thus the only one who is reasonably well-developed. As a repressed and troubled woman whose catchphrase could be “my mother…” it’s no surprise that The Haunting of Hill House gets pegged as psychological horror. She’s not too tightly wrapped at the beginning and only gets worse but I wouldn’t agree that she’s an unreliable narrator – she’s in a haunted house that is stated in the first paragraph to be a living organism and repeatedly bends physics when it gets riled; rather than our heroine, the entire story is unreliable. Eleanor is a brittle, self-pitying mess but she really does have nowhere to go and she commands sympathy as Hill House focuses its attention on her and the others respond by turning a blind eye to her increasingly erratic speech and behaviour. They are all strangers to each other and this provides a genuine chill – in such a scenario, this troubled woman is derided and ostracized, looked down upon as an attention-seeker; implicitly seen as the weakest link, she’s offered no real support even from Dr. Montague, who should be taking full responsibility for his assistants. The sense of isolation that is a major part of the atmosphere in The Haunting of Hill House has as much to do with the people in it as its out-of-the-way location.

Still, most of the book’s shivers and fascination are in how Hill House reacts to Eleanor. I’ll spare the specifics of what it does but the house remains noticeably quiet until Eleanor shows it some respect, feebly protesting the uncleared dinner table left for the housekeeper in the morning. That very night comes the first aggressive manifestation. The following morning Montague describes poltergeist phenomena, eliciting a most disconcerting mood swing in Eleanor: Suddenly, without reason, laughter trembled inside Eleanor; she wanted to run to the head of the table and hug the doctor, she wanted to reel, chanting, across the stretches of the lawn, she wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms and move in great emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms of Hill House; I am here, I am here, she thought. She shut her eyes quickly in delight and then said demurely to the doctor, “And what do we do today?” Hill House is quick to respond…

This is what caught my interest, as Eleanor’s view of the house changes from loathing and fear to a rhapsodic sense of freedom and unity with it. Since the story wasn’t scaring me anyway I took this more mystical interpretation and rolled with it, though I’m sure Jackson intended Hill House to be an evil thing and the ending horrific (which it absolutely would be in real life). I feel a bit guilty about this but what else could I do? The dialogue is atrocious, the major characters underdeveloped, the minor ones completely stock (like the standard-issue horror-movie housekeeper and Eleanor’s petit bourgeois cliché of a sister) and Jackson killed what was left of her spooky atmosphere with the late addition of the “comic” character Mrs. Montague. She strides through the pages like one of Bertie Wooster’s fire-breathing aunts, being deeply offensive and belittling to everyone she sees and – despite being ready-made for some satisfying karmic retribution – she gets away without even a word against her. There’s nothing funny about her inclusion and she completely changes the tone of the novel just as Hill House prepares its most sinister onslaught.

The Haunting of Hill House was published in 1959 and I am perhaps being too hard on it. The characters get in the way but most of the supernatural occurrences are subtly drawn and memorable acts of the imagination. No gruesome manifestations are to be found and the housekeeper’s introductory speech is the only bit that verges on cartoonish. The actual horror elements have not dated. They didn’t “scare” me but I found myself pleasantly creeped out at times (to say nothing of the last 15 pages, which finally drop the quaint conversation charade and are unquestionably the strongest and most intense portion of The Haunting of Hill House).

Looking at reviews, it’s clear I’m the odd one out. Most people respond to the writing, the scares, the characters. I was remarkably unmoved by the entire thing. Perhaps I just don’t play ball when it comes to horror fiction – after all, my main points of comparison while reading were with two unusual short stories: Felisberto Hernández’ ‘The Balcony’ and Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis.’ Make of that what you will and seek this out if you think it’ll have a better effect on you than it did on me.